"How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures."
     - Psalm 104:24

"How manifold are thy works!
They are hidden before men
Oh sole God, beside whom
there is no other.
Thou didst create earth
according to thy heart."
      -Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton) from Rosicrucian Question and Answers, p. 55

"The word 'heart' may mean either 'pleasure' or 'understanding' here."
     - Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion

"The idea of messages materializing out of marks on stone amazed ordinary people and the scribes who could make 'stone talk' were considered to be holders of great magic. This is easily appreciated when one realizes that the Egyptians called hieroglyphics 'the Words of the God', a term that would often be repeated throughout the Bible."
     - Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus

Five of the Ten Commandments delivered from Mount Sinai can be found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain....Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery...Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor..."
     - Exodus 20: 7-16

'Not have I despised god...Not have I killed...Not have I fornicated...Not have I despoiled the thing of the god...not have I defiled the wife of a man...Not have I cursed god...Not have I borne false witness'.
     - Egyptian Book of the Dead

"...Chapter CXXV of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead...consisted on a series of negative confessions that the soul of the deceased was obliged to make before Thoth in his capacity as divine judge and scribe.
"...A rubric to one part of the Book of the Dead...stated: This chapter was found on an alabaster brick, under the feet of the Majesty of this venerable place, the God Thoth, and it was written by the God himself'...The Ark of the Covenant had frequently been referred to in the Bible as the 'footstool of God' (e.g. I Chronicles 28:2) and...it contained the stone Tablets of the Law written by Yahweh's own finger."
     - Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal

"...In Egypt ritual was of central importance;...there was a place for it in every Egyptian settlement; and... personal piety was closely connected with the temple and its images...God's command was not made explicit but was confined to the establishing of maat [justice], so that there was no place in Egyptian religious literature for that Law which played so great a role in Israel...The teachings concerned with right conduct and maat as its criterion were based expressly upon human experience, and did not claim to be the word of God."
     - Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion

"Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it, that ye may keep the commandments of Yahweh your God which I command you."
     - Deuteronomy 4:2

"Take no word away, and add nothing thereto and put not one thing in the place of another."
     - Instruction of Ptah-hotep

There is the possibility "that this sentence found its way to Palestine together with Egyptian wisdom literature. There it may have led to the formulation, in an admittedly most effective way, of the central concern of a scriptural religion: the safeguarding of the text against omissions, additions or alterations."
     - Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion

Psalm 104 may have been derived from the Egyptian "Hymn to Aton".

"These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season."
     - Psalms 104:27 (King James Bible)

"These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time."
     - Psalms 104:27 (New International Bible)

"Thy enemy is smitten in his time."
     - Inscription in the Temple of Ramses III at Karnak Amon

"Somebody is said to be 'in his time' (the time ordained for him); something occurs 'in its time' (the time provided for it or suited to it)....In the Old Testament...we hear that something is 'in due season' or where certain events have their particular 'time' (Koheleth 3, 1-8)."
"So far as persons are concerned, it can be said of a god or of a man that he is 'in his time'. The best known of all such statements are no doubt the parallels drawn between the deities and Ramses II, the hero of the poem commemorating the battle he fought at Kadesh. On the First Pylon at Luxor we are told that he was like Seth 'in his time'. Or the king himself cries out: 'I am as Baal in his time', and finally he returns triumphantly 'as my father Month in his time'."
     - Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion

"Bow down thine ear, and hear the words of the wise, and apply thine heart unto my knowledge. For it is a pleasant thing if thou keep them within thee; they shall withal be fitted in thy lips. That thy trust may be in the Lord, I have made known to thee this day, even to thee. Have I not written to thee excellent things in counsels and knowledge, that I might make thee know the certainty of the words of truth; that thou mightest answer the words of truth to them that send unto thee?"
     - Proverbs 22:21

There are "the familiar parallels between Egyptian and Israelite wisdom literature [Proverbs 22:17-23:11] which in general may be regarded as a gift of Egypt....For instance, the Egyptian (and Mesopotamian) lists of knowledge, which were the basis of the proverbs which King Solomon spoke on all manner of things, ranging from the cedar to the hysop, or the various Egyptian influences upon the mood, concepts and diction of the so-called 'preacher of Solomon' (Koheleth)."
     - Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion

In Proverbs 22:17-23:11, "every proverb but one can be paralleled in The Instruction of Amen-em-Opet. In addition the book as a whole shows many affinities with other well-known Egyptian wisdom books and with various Mesopotamian wisdom texts. (Recent studies have also disclosed a large Phoenician influence on the book)."
     - Robert C. Denton in "The Proverbs", Wisdom, Literature and Poetry

Note: "Not until c. 200 BC is a Hebrew author known to us by name in surviving texts: Jesus ben Sirach, author of our Bibles' Ecclesiaticus [a book of wisdom]."
     - Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version

"My love is a cluster of henna flowers among the vines of En-Gedi'."
     - Song of Songs 1:14

"I belong to you like this plot of ground planted with flowers and sweet smelling herbs."
     - Egyptian love song

"In both the Egyptian songs and the Song of Songs, the lovers call each other brother and sister, and there are references in both to the sweet speech of the beloved and to the luxuries of the time."
     - -Great Events of Bible Times

"Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."
     - Isaiah

"Gaze here, and drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be."
     - Miscelanea Gregoriana

According to the observations of the Greek historian Herodotus, "when the Egyptians are seated at a banquet, he writes, they pass around a deceased person in a container (i.e. no doubt a mummy-like statuette) so as to remind themselves of death and to encourage each other to enjoy life..."
     - Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion

Note the rebuke in the New Testament for this attitude:

"And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou, fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee [tonight, you die]; then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?"
     - Luke 12:18

Compare also the following texts from the New Kingdom of Egypt:

"Prepare not thyself on this day for tomorrow ere it be come. Is not[?] yesterday like today upon the hands of God?"
     - Wisdom text from early Rameside period (Cerny and Gardiner, Hieratic Ostraca)

"The years are in his hand."
     - Hymn to Amon-Re (Papyrus, Berlin 3049, XIII, 2)

Hyperlinks

·The Exodus
·The Plagues of Egypt